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I’ve just released alpha version 38 which finally includes GPU simulated particles as an option in the editor under Emitter Options. It’s been a busy month setting this up but I’m very happy with the results so far. Pretty much everything that’s simulated on the CPU can now be simulated on the GPU with one or two exceptions. Here’s a copy/paste of what’s in the documentation regarding the new feature: Running Emitters on the GPU Any particle emitter can be moved onto the graphics card by checking Run on GPU under Emitter Options. Once it’s on, a compute shader moves, Read more

So I got an ARM based Mac this weekend and got it compiling to create a universal app for ARM and Intel base Macs. I still have my old Intel based Macbook to test with and it seems to work fine on that too. Doing the ARM version meant that I had to map all of the Intel intrinsics to the ARM equivalents which was reasonably straight forward. A few work arounds were needed here and there and in other situations it was actually easier to do with the ARM intrinsics. Having the library also build for ARM processors is Read more

I’ve just uploaded a new version for Intel based Apple Macs. Unfortunately I have a MacBook Pro from 2015 which is intel based, and whilst I can cross compile to ARM from there there’s no way for me to properly test without a newer ARM based Mac. I would need to test as the code uses a lot of Intel intrinsics for SIMD instructions that don’t all map 1 to 1 to the ARM equivalents. I have already made a start on this but will wait until I get my hands on an ARM based Mac before continuing. I’ll probably Read more

This is the first update where I’m trying to improve the usability of the editor. In this update I’ve completely reworked effect and emitter properties and attributes. Before there were 2 separate lists with properties where you adjust things like the draw order, the emission type, spawn options etc. And attributes where you would change how the particles behave overtime. I’ve combined these all into the same tab and made them all searchable by keyword. I have also rearranged the attributes so that they’re grouped together more logically. As you can see in the screen shot, instead of all the Read more

Wow, 2 months went by already! Loads of work has been since then though, as mentioned in the last update I wanted to add sprite data exporting so that you could playback effects buy just uploading the sprite data to the GPU and interpolating between frames for smooth playback. And this is exactly what I’ve managed to do and it works extremely well! This is just an initial proof of concept but now the basics are done and now I know it will work well I can continue to improve and add features to it. Here’s how it works: Sprite Read more

So the last month and a half has been mainly just trying to figure some things out. Lines You’d think that lines would be quite easy to draw but they’re actually a lot more complicated to do properly then you might think. I wanted to update the line rendering in my renderer so that they were more efficient then they current were. They were just using gl lines basically where it’s a lot harder to manage the thickness of the line. The other reason that I wanted to spend some time on it is because I also want to implement Read more

I have uploaded a new alpha version which I hope brings a lot more stability. After the new 3d version I wanted to refactor a lot of the underlying library to try and optimise it more. I’ve spent a long time thinking about the best way to update particles and in the end I think I’ve come up with a reasonably decent way of doing it by having a 3 separate methods depending on the nature of the particle effects being updated. These 3 different scenarios are: Unordered particles For a lot of particle effects you’re not worried about the Read more

Happy to announce that 3d effects are now possible in the latest alpha version of TimelineFX. Isometric mode is also supported which works well for exporting animations. Here’s a simple mushroom cloud explosion I put together and exported – this just wasn’t possible with only 2D effects: So let’s go over some of the new features: New effect options Obviously the option to actually make an effect 3d is there under effect options. When you create a new effect you now have a bunch of new 3d preset emitters to choose from. But also you can convert an existing 2d Read more